Examining the Dell PERC H310 Controller
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The Dell PERC H310 is an entry level RAID controller card from LSI. The controller for this card is the LSI LSISAS2008.
That is a SAS controller and not designed to be a RAID chip, however. The SAS controller claims that the RAID is handled in hardware, which appears to be true. But there is no cache so the RAID handling is anemic as the drive's own caches are disabled when in RAID. This makes for a very poor RAID experience.
There seem to be issues with driver support needed for the array to function. I have been unable to find anyone with one of these cards for testing, but it is not yet conclusive that this is true hardware RAID given the lack of RAID controller, lack of memory and requirement for software which would make us tend to believe that this is FakeRAID, rather than horrible low end hardware RAID.
The obvious test for this is to see if drives can be seen individually after being joined to an array when the drivers are not installed.
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Do you use something like a Live CD to see if the drives appear individually when the 'array' has been made?
Or during install of Windows/hypervisor?
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@Dashrender said:
Do you use something like a Live CD to see if the drives appear individually when the 'array' has been made?
Or during install of Windows/hypervisor?
LiveCD is best as many hypervisors and nearly always Windows has FakeRAID drivers included specifically to hide potential FakeRAID systems from end users.
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I had some good fun with this card a few weeks ago. The array attached to it lost a drive and the array was in a degraded state. There is a super fun bug with this card in an R520. The bug is if the array is in a degraded state, the server will shut down, attempt to reboot and not make it past POST. Wonderful.
For those interested in the fix -
- Replace drive and let array rebuild to 100% (yeah, the server has to stay down until the array is in an optimal state. Sigh.)
- Update BIOS to fix bug.
- Server is happy again.
P.S.
This card won't be in any more of my servers. -
Entry level RAID controllers always seem to be full of sadness. I think that RAID controllers are one of those places where a small (sort of) financial investment almost always pays off in the long run.
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what do you think of my RAID controller showed on the following image ??
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is it fake or real ??
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PERC 6 is definitely a real hardware RAID controller.
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thank you Dear @scottalanmiller
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I have one of these. Do you want me to run some tests?
Also, should I get rid of this and get the next model up? Going to do 3 Edge SSDs on it in a RAID 5 config.
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You have an H310 that is not being used for anything?
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It's in my new server that is currently sitting dormant, awaiting the release of Server 2016.
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@BRRABill said:
It's in my new server that is currently sitting dormant, awaiting the release of Server 2016.
Ah ha, so we might have some time yet! Months, probably. Yeah, let's do some testing!
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Let's start with a Linux live CD. Linux Mint probably has more drivers than most, but their live CD is really easy to deal with. I'd download that and let's see what it sees with that controller.
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OK.
I won't see it again until Monday. Let me know what you want me to do, and I'll do it.
Maybe it'll prove itself worthy and I won't have to upgrade.
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You want to try running it as a Linux server?
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Or do you mean the H310 being worthy?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Or do you mean the H310 being worthy?
I mean the H310 being worthy.
In that for my usage I can keep it instead of moving to the T710.
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Not likely, we know it has no cache hardware or not.
